[HN Gopher] Twitch limiting uploads to 100 hours, deleting the r...
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Twitch limiting uploads to 100 hours, deleting the rest starting
April 19th
Author : aestetix
Score : 148 points
Date : 2025-02-20 00:30 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| taraindara wrote:
| If less than 0.5% of users upload over 100hrs, then either this
| is an extreme penny pinching move, or some few in that 0.5%
| upload a massive overage of content.
| thisgoodlife wrote:
| I guess it's the latter. If you can afford, give your users a
| generous offer, but never unlimited. Otherwise, some people
| will find very creative ways to abuse it.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| That's kind of the main consideration with production LLM
| apps right now. Really looking for a startup that solves this
| out of the box (llm credit payment system that manages the
| reality that remote LLM usage can never be unlimited).
|
| Twitch will offer a premium sub for heavy users most likely.
| jsheard wrote:
| Yep, full time streamers run up a _lot_ of hours.
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/authorblu.es/post/3likxmdytys2l
|
| Assuming ~6000kbit/sec that's about 17TB of archived video
| for that guy alone.
| mqus wrote:
| yeah, kinda, but VODs (the automatic recordings) are not
| covered by this change. This is about edits & uploads, so
| stuff you would usually put on youtube. If you're a full
| time streamer and stream every day, Twitch will still
| provide your past streams for 2 (or 3? not sure) months (or
| less if you're not popular) and this will not change
| anything for you.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| That's just $500 worth of storage though (and your 6Mbps is
| likely bit high IMHO).
|
| Billing the owner a few bucks each month the each thousand
| hours of extra storage would make much more sense than
| removing everything.
| jsheard wrote:
| > and your 6Mbps is likely bit high IMHO
|
| 6Mbps is Twitches recommended ingest bitrate, and their
| highest quality just serves the ingested stream back to
| viewers without transcoding. In reality the storage would
| actually be a little higher still because they have to
| store all the transcoded lower resolution versions as
| well.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > 6Mbps is Twitches recommended ingest bitrate, and their
| highest quality just serves the ingested stream back to
| viewers without transcoding.
|
| Interesting, I wouldn't have guessed that it would make
| sense for them with regard to bandwidth cost. TIL,
| thanks.
| jsheard wrote:
| It's a trade-off between bandwidth and encoding capacity.
| Twitch actually only guarentees transcoding for
| "partnered" streamers above a certain viewership
| threshold, so when watching a smaller streamer you might
| _only_ be able to view the "source" quality if there
| isn't enough encoding capacity to go around.
| DanHulton wrote:
| I don't think you've thought this through. You can't
| _just_ bill the owner a couple of bucks each month. You
| need a whole infrastructure to do that. You need to plan,
| design, build, test, deploy, maintain, and provide
| customer service for an entire new feature of your site.
| You need to research, test, revise and communicate what
| the price for storage is going to be (and handle the
| immediate and ongoing backlash). You need to catrgorize
| and plan for this new income stream AS WELL AS the costs
| to get it started and the ongoing costs to maintain it.
|
| That's all just off the top of my head, and all of that
| is going to be fighting against all the other projects
| that people want to get done, projects that are likely
| way more profitable and way closer to the primary goal of
| the company -- being an intentional streaming service,
| not an accidental video hosting service.
| rane wrote:
| Doesn't the infrastructure already exist?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Of course it does, these dudes already have this amount
| of video stored on Twitch's server.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| It's Twitch not some indie startup.
|
| You're not entirely wrong but you're exaggerating the
| difficulty.
| redserk wrote:
| That's just looking at theoretical costs but completely
| ignores the actual revenue side.
|
| If they annoy the most active streamers to the point they
| leave to another site, why should a viewer stay at Twitch
| versus just using another site?
|
| I'm assuming some of these accounts bring in far more
| than the $500-1000 it costs to host old video.
|
| Going from an unknown limit down to 100 hours with little
| notice shows how shortsighted Twitch was here.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > just $500
|
| That's the cost for just buying disks, but storing data
| in the cloud costs more than that and it's an ongoing
| cost.
|
| S3 charges 1.25c/GB/month for this sort of data. So
| that's $200/month for just this guy. There may be 100s or
| thousands of these people. Easily adds up.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > That's the cost for just buying disks, but storing data
| in the cloud costs more than that and it's an ongoing
| cost.
|
| > S3 charges 1.25c/GB/month for this sort of data.
|
| It doesn't cost them anywhere close that. Their
| competitors charge twice as less or more an still make
| money.
|
| Twitch belongs to Amazon, they _are_ the cloud.
|
| Setting up your own infra to handle this is of course
| going to cost you a lot more than that, but when you have
| the infra set up then the _marginal price_ is hardware (+
| a monthly electricity bill, which is not as high as for
| other kind of workload).
|
| And even if they had to charge $200 a month, they should
| probably offer the option instead of just removing the
| content: we're talking about professionals who make money
| out of the platform (and earn Twitch their income), they
| can make the choice whether or not they can afford it.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > And even if they had to charge $200 a month, they
| should probably offer the option instead of just removing
| the content: we're talking about professionals who make
| money out of the platform
|
| There's no way these professionals have 6000 hours of
| _interesting_ content and there 's no way they would pay
| $200/month to store it. They're just saving everything
| they ever record because it's free.
|
| Implementing that feature would cost more money than it
| would ever make.
| protimewaster wrote:
| That's assuming none of that video is something that Twitch
| is storing for any other reason (i.e., other users have
| highlights of the same thing, or they would store the
| videos internally for some reason).
|
| It's possible the actual additional storage requirements
| for that specific user are minuscule, since we don't know
| what data they are/aren't archiving themselves, if they're
| doing any deduplicating, etc.
| nutrientharvest wrote:
| It's the latter. Some people abuse the system by highlighting
| the full length of every broadcast, turning their highlights
| section into a complete archive of their streams, which is not
| something Twitch ever wanted to offer.
| MSM wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to say twitch "never wanted to offer"
| when not long ago, that behavior was the base functionality.
| You could rewatch everyone's entire streams forever. There
| was a DMCA scare at some point when streamers were getting in
| trouble for their old streams having music and many took down
| all of their history, but before then you'd see years worth
| of streams for people
| fcoury wrote:
| I did that, but not as a way to abuse the system. I used to
| export all my streams to YouTube directly from Twitch without
| downloading it first. I would just trim the beginning of the
| stream and sometimes split in more than one video if I had
| multiple content in one stream. I have hundreds of videos
| starting from 2018. I just thought this was ok and now I'm
| going through the effort of exporting them individually to a
| youtube account. I wish they had offered at least a way to
| export or download them in batch.
| Etheryte wrote:
| This is the standard outcome for any type of hosting service
| that starts out with low/no limitations. The vast majority of
| the users use it in a way that's sustainable for both parties,
| and then there's a small subset of users who abuse the system
| to such an extent that it becomes financially infeasible.
| Nearly every free hosting service in history has jumped through
| these hoops at one point.
| tsunitsuni wrote:
| 0.5% of users is still a lot of people, especially on Twitch.
| Streaming with more than 11 viewers puts you in the top 3%
| already:
| https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1367868296473813001
| fsflover wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137085
| aestetix wrote:
| I actually submitted this two days ago, as you can see here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aestetix
|
| I wonder why it's showing "2 hours ago" and it's now showing
| up.
| davethedevguy wrote:
| Could be the second chance pool
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309
| eieio wrote:
| It is! You can see the pool here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
|
| And this submission shows up there (it's on the second page
| at the time that I write this comment)
| DeepSeaTortoise wrote:
| Wonder if there's going to be a bidding war between sponsors on
| who gets to keep their videos
| pr337h4m wrote:
| Short-sighted move, super long video data could be quite useful
| in the near future
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| The infographic says "New 100-Hour Highlights & Uploads Storage
| Limit".
|
| Past Broadcasts (VODs) and Clips are unaffected.
| moefh wrote:
| Normal VODs already automatically "expire" (i.e., are
| automatically deleted) after a certain time. IIRC the time
| limit is between 7 and 60 days depending on your account type
| (e.g. whether you're a Twitch partner, whether you have
| Twitch Prime, etc.).
|
| Making a VOD a highlight was a way around that -- Twitch
| would never delete those.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| >Making a VOD a highlight was a way around that -- Twitch
| would never delete those.
|
| I'm not disagreeing that it was common knowledge that this
| was a way for non-partners to circumvent the regular
| retention policies, which is why this 100-hour limit seems
| like a pretty generous compromise.
|
| Clicking through random channels just now, I didn't see a
| single account with any Uploads, and most of the channels
| who had any content in Highlights seemed to use it pretty
| sparingly (<100 hours). It doesn't seem like a common
| practice, and Twitch doesn't seem like it's trying to
| eradicate history, just reign in some behavior that the
| platform didn't intend to support.
|
| If you're aware of certain communities who've made a
| practice of highlighting their entire streams (beyond 100
| hours) without being partnered, maybe you could promote
| them here so people could help archive them?
| mistercheph wrote:
| Jeff?
| moefh wrote:
| I remember when Twitch implemented the VOD expiration
| with the "highlight" system; the discourse at the time
| was that some people enabled VOD retention and then
| forgot about it, uselessly clogging the servers. So if
| you _really_ cared about retaining VODs, you just had to
| highlight them. I think they just counted on no one
| caring enough, since highlighting every single VOD is a
| pain.
|
| It turns out that most people who cared enough about
| retaining VODs just upload them to Youtube. Youtube is
| simply a better viewing experience for non-live videos,
| and it can generate some revenue (though usually very
| small, unless you have a huge amount of views). One
| problem with Youtube is that it's more strict about (what
| it thinks is) copyright content -- for example, some
| otherwise "free"[1] videogame music is regularly claimed
| by on Youtube by someone who sampled the original song,
| so it registers as someone else's content to Youtube's
| content ID.
|
| [1] By "free" I mean that original videogame music is not
| usually actively protected (even though it's under
| copyright), because publishers love when people promote
| their games.
| madshougesen wrote:
| Are you sure about the time limit?
|
| This VOD is over 2 years old [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/
| 1891768073](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1891768073)
| moefh wrote:
| Well, the settings page on Twitch has this help text on
| the "store past broadcasts" toggle:
| Automatically save broadcasts for up to 7 days (14 days
| for Affiliates, 60 days for Partners, Turbo and Prime
| users)
|
| Maybe the video you're seeing is a highlight? Either way,
| I can't see it because I don't subscribe to Khaldor (I
| used to love watching his Starcraft 2 casts back in the
| day, though).
| EwanToo wrote:
| Deleting it from the public site doesn't mean they're not
| keeping it for internal use...
| anticensor wrote:
| What if they intend to rotate storage, replacing old content
| by newer content over a period of 2 months, plus 100h/user of
| non-replaceable content?
| phyzome wrote:
| What ever for?
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| Supposedly for training models to generate gameplay videos,
| like what Microsoft (and others) have presented [0] recently.
|
| [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/research/blog/introducing-mu...
| wongarsu wrote:
| Also virtual environment creation, agent training, etc. For
| any given game you can create a small dataset of recordings
| of both player inputs and gameplay footage, use that to
| create a model that can derive inputs from looking at
| footage, and then create input sequences for your huge
| backlog of gameplay footage. From there you can use the
| backlog to train AI that either recreates realistic player
| actions from screen inputs, or AI that recreates the entire
| game (like the AI minecraft)
|
| Not to mention the huge amount of voice samples and webcam
| footage you could use for more typical voice cloning, text
| to speech, human avatar creation, etc
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| If people watch it currently then it has value in a training
| set.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Isn't this just happening on the highlights section? If so, seems
| reasonable - am I missing something?
| protimewaster wrote:
| I don't use Twitch much, but, based on what other users have
| said, I think highlights was the only part not already
| subjected to automatic deletion after 60 days.
|
| So I think the reaction is because there's no now way to keep
| over 100 hours of video long term on Twitch?
| mbasho wrote:
| I don't understand why not just target abusive accounts. Maybe
| the speed running community will have to find a new home.
| jsheard wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what they're doing? You have to draw the
| line for abuse somewhere, and they've drawn it at 100 hours.
| ctrl-j wrote:
| There are playthroughs of single games that are more than 100
| hours. Even if you're only playing "short" games, you're
| looking at 6-10 hours, which means you only give your
| audience a library of 10-15 vods? Average games are 20-40, so
| 5?
|
| Vod viewing on twitch is also a pain, ads every 10 minutes,
| buggy playback, and vods don't play in order.
|
| What's going to happen is anyone currently storing their
| playthroughs on twitch is now going to export to youtube. So
| I guess they want youtube to get the ad rev.
| asmor wrote:
| It'll just make also streaming to YouTube (or other
| services) simultaneously more attractive. Apparently Twitch
| has exclusivity agreements with some people, but it's
| already pretty common to do this.
| hibikir wrote:
| And it might make sense, if the way youtube stores the
| video is more efficient. Ultimately live
| streaming/simulcasting are different that cold video. See
| how Netflix, having no problems doing efficient movie
| serving, doesn't do quite so great at providing a good
| experience in live events. And I'd bet that the storage
| model for youtube and Netflix is already quite different,
| as the number of total videos, and the distribution of who
| watches what, when and where, is quite different.
| rincebrain wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be more efficient, necessarily,
| just valuable enough to be more worthwhile.
|
| In this case, they seem to be saying long-form archives
| aren't helping their business and are very expensive.
|
| Of course, since that also de facto means people start
| pointing to their YouTube pages as their content
| archives, that means they think they have such a better
| platform for live content that they can survive people
| doing the calculus of "well, if I have to host my old
| content on YT anyway, why am I using Twitch if I'm just
| going to upload to YT after..."
|
| Whether that's true or not, we'll see. (One might argue
| this is a given comparing the number of people I know who
| stream on Twitch versus YT, but Twitch is also the place
| that thought people wanted them to integrate a game store
| in their desktop app, and appears to have the attention
| span of a squirrel in long-term platform initiatives,
| so...we'll see.)
|
| (I work for Google, I've never worked on anything related
| to YouTube, opinions my own.)
| nilamo wrote:
| Are there really 5+ day nonstop playthroughs? Are there
| just hours of no content while the streamer eats/sleeps?
| Why wouldn't that be split into multiple parts by the
| streamer, as a natural consequence of how it was recorded?
| michaelt wrote:
| According to https://link.twitch.tv/storage Twitch's
| limit is 100 hours stored _total_ , not just _per-video_
|
| So you'd hit the limit after 600 ten-minute videos, or
| 100 hour-long videos.
|
| The limit also seems to apply to "Highlights" and
| "Uploads" but not to "Past Broadcasts", "VODs" or "Clips"
| for added confusion.
| rincebrain wrote:
| As pointed out elsewhere, past broadcasts/VODs had an
| autodelete horizon added years ago, so after a certain
| point, you'd have to reupload your content if you wanted
| it archived in perpetuity.
|
| One might imagine this is just the logical followup of
| them adding that horizon initially, basically saying "the
| 1 in 200 of you who circumvented our policy, no, for
| real, stop that."
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| There have been streamers doing subathons of 30+ days.
| They usually eat while doing something else/watching
| something they will comment later, while they sleep there
| is either no content or some friends/moderators talk to
| the viewers.
| krykp wrote:
| I would prefer views, to be honest. For example if some
| arbitrary content is stored for 2 months without anyone ever
| watching it, that feels reasonable for me to remove it, no
| one is watching it. Some video that is actually serving a
| purpose being culled just because of the arbitrary hour limit
| feels to me, a less reasonable stance.
|
| In practice though I doubt this makes a huge difference
| either way, the vast majority of the people that can have
| noticeable amount of views on such already have their YouTube
| channels or other venues they are also making money from.
| vasco wrote:
| It says on the thing they will remove based on views,
| lowest first, to meet the quota.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Seems like that policy would generate fake views.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Then there will be an army of bots inflating view counts.
| bhickey wrote:
| I don't think this will impact speedrunning much:
|
| > This won't apply to Past Broadcasts (VODs) or clips.
| cbhl wrote:
| On Twitch, Past Broadcasts (VODs) are already deleted after
| 60 days.
|
| If you see a video-on-demand that is older than that, then
| that is an "upload" and not a "VOD" and thus is in-scope.
| bhickey wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification!
| bakugo wrote:
| Twitch only stores Past Broadcasts for 2 months before
| they're automatically deleted. If you want to keep them past
| the 2 months, you have to convert them into Highlights, which
| are affected.
|
| So yes, this will absolutely affect the speedrunning
| community, and anyone else who has been using this method to
| archive old streams.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Speedrunners are worried: https://bsky.app/profile/summonings
| alt.bsky.social/post/3lik...
| philipov wrote:
| The big problem with this move is that it doesn't give people
| enough time to migrate, and they can't make new highlights
| while they struggle to download upwards of 3000 hours (in the
| multiple terabytes) of old video, at the same time as hundreds
| or thousands of other partners doing the same thing.
|
| This affects far more people at a much higher scale than Twitch
| will admit, and the deadline given isn't enough for these data
| transfers to complete.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > the speed running community
|
| I was under the impression that the principal objective of
| speed running was to get things done quickly. You should be
| able to fit a lot of valuable information within the quota if
| you are any good at it.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| Not really. That's like saying a wrestler is only in the
| match for a few minutes so why do they need all of that
| training.
|
| Speedrunners are often playing the game or parts of the game
| hundreds of times. And they're usually performing techniques
| that take lots of precision and therefore lots of practice.
|
| So they stream it all, documenting their attempts and trying
| new strategies in front of a live audience. They produce so
| much comment that there are YouTube channels that make
| documentaries about different speedrunners.
| emacsen wrote:
| This comes from a misunderstanding of what speedrunning is.
|
| It's not merely doing something quickly; it's more akin to a
| sport.
|
| The objective of speedrunning is to perform something you
| would do in a game in a record time, or it's now been
| somewhat expanded to sometimes include or mean some
| extraordinary feat in a game that may not be directly related
| to speed.
|
| A speedrun of a game might mean to complete a game that would
| normally take months in (for example) "only 10 hours", in
| which case the speedrunner needs to be live for those ten
| hours. A recording is not an acceptable substitute due to
| issues of cheating[1].
|
| Even if a speedrun is only two hours, a speedrunner may need
| to play the same game four, five, or twelve times in order to
| achieve their objective. They could be playing for an hour
| and fifty minutes only to have the entire run ruined by a
| mistake, or even just a random game event.
|
| [1] It's still possible to cheat live, but it's more
| complicated, more challenging, and there's a greater
| likelihood of being caught.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > Even if a speedrun is only two hours, a speedrunner may
| need to play the same game four, five, or twelve times in
| order to achieve their objective. They could be playing for
| an hour and fifty minutes only to have the entire run
| ruined by a mistake, or even just a random game event.
|
| I am still not following why Twitch needs to maintain live
| copies of all the failed runs. Once you hit the objective,
| make _that_ video the highlight or whatever to be persisted
| indefinitely.
|
| Why would anyone care about watching several hours of
| something when they know ahead of time it's not going to be
| representative of a successful outcome? Iteration #17 out
| of hundreds can't possibly be valuable enough to justify
| the storage cost in even the most charitable of cases. It
| seems to me that most of speed running could be done
| completely offline without involving the internet and video
| capture technology (i.e., practicing a musical instrument).
| Philpax wrote:
| Watching the speedrunner improve, watching them discover
| new techniques, the discussion they have with their
| audience, etc. Speedrunning, ironically, is not just
| about the destination: it's about the (often public!)
| journey the speedrunner took to get there.
| rincebrain wrote:
| Speedrunning in terms of archiving the completed run for
| future reference as the Thing To Beat, sure.
|
| But part of the reason this has become such a popular
| thing is the community aspect of it - people get drawn in
| and inspired to participate because they get engaged in
| the community of either particular runners or the wider
| community of people who follow all the runners of some
| games.
|
| At least for me, while I've never had the desire to
| participate, when I was sick for a year or so, and
| therefore at home with little ability to participate in a
| lot of other things, I went down the rabbit hole of
| watching different runs of different games, and one of
| the more useful tools and timesinks was being able to
| watch the past broadcasts of different runners and seeing
| if they were enjoyable to watch, at the particular game
| whose speedruns were interesting me at the moment.
|
| And since not everyone just runs one or two things,
| sometimes their last runs of those games were months in
| the past.
|
| So at least in my n=1 experience, those broadcast
| archives specifically were quite useful for me as a
| viewer and person attempting to discover more streamers
| to watch.
| emacsen wrote:
| As the others have said, it's about the journey, so let
| me expand on this a bit.
|
| Streaming games has a large social component, whether
| it's speedrunning, or just casual play. It's often as
| much about the personality of the player as it is about
| the game. People watch as a communal activity.
| EfficientDude wrote:
| Speedrunning is mostly cheaters using combinations of
| emulation, save states, etc. I don't think speedrunners
| actually speedrun on unmodified consoles in one go at all
| these days. Of course back in the day anything other than
| playing on a console attached to a TV would have been
| considered cheating and gotten you thrown out of the
| community.
| crtasm wrote:
| This is incorrect - look at the setup and verification
| required if you want to claim a record on a popular game.
|
| You may be thinking of TAS (Tool Assisted Speedruns) which
| is a separate thing.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| It really depends, usually console vs emulation are
| separate categories, as are stuff like having external
| assists and such
| Vilian wrote:
| Usually you should know about a subject before talking
| about, instead of talking shit
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| [Ending] Baten Kaitos 100% Speedrun in 338 Hours, 43 Minutes
| and 26 Seconds
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FezT4GTZj0g
|
| :)
|
| FAQ why its so long
|
| https://pastebin.com/BRvPJ430
|
| - Why is it so long? In this game, items evolve over time.
| There is an item, the Shampoo, that takes literally 2 weeks
| (= 336 hours) to evolve into Splendid Hair.
| trackofalljades wrote:
| Archive Team? (shines bat signal)
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Not everything is worth archiving for all eternity. Do we
| really need a 300 hour Final Fantasy 7 playthrough with 3
| viewers archived for all eternity like it's the Magna Carta
| Funes- wrote:
| But that's missing the point of what archiving content on the
| Internet tends to be mostly about: you cannot possibly go
| through all of it and decide what's worth archiving, so you
| archive it _all_ by default. Then, you can skim through it or
| remove whatever you choose to.
| juped wrote:
| easy for you to say, mr. el memorioso
| tdhz77 wrote:
| When we find out John Smith played final fantasy before
| establishing the earliest of human rights. Maybe?
| dehrmann wrote:
| There is this story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski
| and how film saved the photo, but this feels like a 1996
| problem. In 2006, disk space was cheap enough to save all
| the photos.
|
| https://professionalartistmag.com/how-film-saved-now-
| infamou...
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Vimeo banned video game content in 2008. Users migrated to other
| sites that were soon worth far more than Vimeo.
|
| Focusing on video game material instead of being neutral and
| coming up with a reasonable business model that makes sense for
| all your customers (then communicating it up front) is the
| problem. There's always going to be a subset of customers that
| pushes the envelope. This conflicts with short term growth
| strategies but perhaps there's a little room for ethics to sneak
| in.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/vimeo-bans-v...
| EfficientDude wrote:
| Just to be clear - no video streaming site or service has been
| profitable in the long run, not yet anyway.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| Are there any numbers on YouTube? While I don't doubt their
| costs are orders of magnitude bigger that other services,
| they also operate at a different scale operate as a defacto
| music service (I'm not talking about YT Music), and have the
| largest pool of ads to serve
| packetlost wrote:
| iirc they turned a profit one quarter a few years ago but
| are otherwise a loss leader for Googles as business
| acchow wrote:
| YouTube profits aren't broken out separately. However,
| Google's quarterly and annual reports do give Youtube Ad
| revenues, which were $36bn in fiscal 2024. That Youtube
| is not profitable is quite the strong claim.....
|
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204
| 425...
| deanCommie wrote:
| Technically nothing what you said disputes the claim.
|
| You're jumping to the assumption that surely YouTube's
| costs have to be lower than $36B, and that is not at all
| assured. They handle an absolutely gargantuan amount of
| network data transfer, not to mention processing compute.
| I'm ignoring the storage but even that at their scale is
| probably at least 1B.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Vimeo, a terrible business, has been profitable for seven
| straight quarters.
|
| "From Q4 2023 to Q3 2024, YouTube's combined revenue from
| advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#cite_note-13
| SR2Z wrote:
| YouTube has been making a few billion dollars a year in
| profit for a while now.
|
| Yes, network and compute is expensive, but when you are
| the size of Google the economics look a little different.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| In addition to the loss leader aspect it has for their
| other business units, what about more traditional
| expenses? Directly serving ads aside, all the user
| behavioral and popular trend data has to be hugely
| valuable in its own right. Plus all that ML training data
| would have cost them something if they hadn't already had
| it sitting on their servers.
|
| It seems like you just have to be sufficiently large
| before you can successfully monetize a video platform.
| rchaud wrote:
| And yet it is not Vimeo who has to delete petabytes of data to
| cut costs.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Not the point of my original post, but Vimeo is famous for
| layoffs and firing expensive customers, too. In March 2022
| they told some users that their channels would now cost
| thousands of dollars a month.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| If this is a thing that really matters, it wouldn't be that hard
| to build a competitor right?
| claudex wrote:
| the problem to build a competitor is the community, not the
| technical part. If one (or a handful of) streamer move
| elsewhere, most of the viewers won't follow him
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Of course. But we've seen it happen before. Digg had a huge
| lead on Reddit, angered the community enough that they left.
| Myspace v Facebook. Etc.
|
| I don't use Twitch deeply so I'm not sure if this is a big
| enough thing to make people switch in large numbers, but if
| it is, the tech stack just doesn't seem like a moat at all
| these days. If anything, I'd say the fact that they prune old
| content already sort of is the opposite. YouTube's deep
| content library makes it hard to compete with them. Twitch
| purposefully doesn't even have one.
|
| A skilled programmer could probably bang out a viable
| competitor in a week, and raise funds just as fast if the AWS
| bill became significant.
| jmholla wrote:
| Yea, but, in addition, Twitch has a very expensive business
| to run. Video is orders of magnitude more data than
| pictures and audio which are itself magnitudes above text.
| The costs in your example are wildly different.
|
| And the culture. Your examples are from the 2000s. The
| culture of the Internet back then was vastly different than
| it is today.
|
| > A skilled programmer could probably bang out a viable
| competitor in a week, and raise funds just as fast if the
| AWS bill became significant.
|
| I disagree. Where is this magic funds button? You're gonna
| need quite the pitch to get an investor to invest LOTS of
| money going up against Amazon (edit: and Google!).
| okdood64 wrote:
| > A skilled programmer
|
| Running a massive video site is not as simple as throwing a
| bunch of skilled programmers at it...
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| That's exactly why Mixer failed to gain popularity, even
| after poaching streamers like Ninja from Twitch.
| brudgers wrote:
| It is as hard or easy as finding the right people. For
| reference, Amazon bought Twitch for about a billion dollars
| instead of trying to build it.
| Figs wrote:
| The competitor _already exists_ and at least some people are
| already using it: PeerTube.
|
| Run it yourself, and you can save whatever videos _your_
| community cares about for _as long as you fucking feel like_
| because YOU OWN IT. None of YouTube 's asinine copyright strike
| bullshit to worry about -- if a company has a problem with your
| use of something they need to send you a _real_ DMCA notice.
| None of Twitch 's random policy change bullshit to worry about.
| No advertising. If your community actually gives a shit about
| the content then they will pitch in to pay for the hosting
| through Patreon, Open Collective, Ko-Fi, etc -- or mirror it
| themselves. Any streamer with a decent number of viewers will
| almost certainly have _someone_ in the audience who is
| technically capable of running an instance if the streamer can
| 't or doesn't want to DIY.
|
| I _get_ being on YouTube and Twitch -- PeerTube 's
| discoverability sucks -- but for goodness sake, take ownership
| of your archives! If you make videos, that is your long tail!
| That is your legacy! Own it!
| mrkramer wrote:
| In one of my thought experiments I was thinking would only audio
| livestreaming be viable social platform for content creators
| because audio is like 90% smaller in size and therefore you don't
| need to spend loads of money to setup and maintain audio
| livestreaming infrastructure.
|
| Btw, I think there is an easy option to export your Twitch
| content to YouTube so that's another way of saving all the
| content.
| vasco wrote:
| So online radio stations? I think its been tried a lot, for
| decades, and while I don't listen often it is not never. I
| think people gravitate towards spotify "radio" without anyone
| talking or podcasts for this use case though.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Yes online radio station plus social features like Twitch and
| even Twitch streamers could restream their live audio to this
| new audio platform.
|
| When you think about social audio, who is number one? Spotify
| is music subscription service and it's not really YouTube for
| audio meant for content creators and SoundCloud is stuck in
| time and it never really took off.
|
| I would like to see SoundCloud reimagined with new features
| and ideas.
| vasco wrote:
| I'm not sure, maybe you have something there but I believe
| that if people are as engaged as you describe for social
| features to make sense, commenting and stuff, they want to
| see the person as well. We are very visual.
| madshougesen wrote:
| Clubhouse was pretty big for a while.
|
| X Spaces is also big-ish (?), but mostly used by crypto
| scammers.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Clubhouse was or still is live audio chat room for people,
| it's not full fledged audio livestreaming platform. Although
| like vasco said most of the people prefer visual content so
| idk how popular would be only audio livestreaming platform.
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| YouTube has tons of videos saved, doesn't it? The key
| difference between YouTube and Twitch is profitability. Twitch
| has never been profitable, and although Amazon has given them
| free rein until now, they're likely facing pressure to start
| making money.
| physicalscience wrote:
| I think Mixlr (https://mixlr.com) might be sort of something
| you are describing. I know they have been around for a good
| while as well.
| cmcaleer wrote:
| I guess it makes sense. I remember once upon a time that Twitch
| saved every broadcast, in full, forever. That sounds kind of
| ridiculous these days, but then again YouTube does still does
| that for everyone's streams and makes it work. Are there very
| different economies of scale at work here or are Google just
| willing to pay the extra money?
| bobnamob wrote:
| I mean surely twitch(an Amazon brand) is leaning on the s3
| scale econ for storage no?
| dehrmann wrote:
| > an Amazon brand
|
| The word you're looking for is "frugality." This is a tail
| use case that isn't cheap to run.
|
| https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _The word you 're looking for is "frugality."_
|
| > https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-
| principles
|
| Leadership principles? Are you saying some exec / director
| ("leader") is looking for a P&L bump for their promo doc?
| jahsome wrote:
| The post says this rule doesn't apply to past broadcasts.
| Presumably that means the rule only applies to uploaded videos.
| Which I did not even realize was a feature, and I've been an
| avid watcher and occasional broadcaster since the justin days.
|
| Edit: others have explained elsewhere VODs are auto deleted
| after 60 days, and then must be converted to highlights, which
| will be affected. I think anyone who relies on Twitch VODs as a
| viewer or producer is a glutton for punishment anyway. The
| viewing experience is dreadful if I remember correctly, enough
| so I just wait for a YouTube upload anyway.
|
| In my anecdotal experience, I have probably watched several
| thousands of hours of live content over the last decade-plus,
| and maybe a half dozen VODs.
| noirbot wrote:
| Twitch VODs aren't really any worse than any other way to
| watch video? I'll regularly use them when I see some stream
| I'm interested in while I'm busy with something else, or if I
| jump into something halfway and want to go back and watch the
| beginning.
|
| What do you think is dreadful about it?
| wongarsu wrote:
| However unlike Twitch, Youtube doesn't save recordings of
| livestreams over 12 hours. Which means that subathons (a format
| where viewers extend the duration of the stream by donating
| money) don't get recorded on Youtube.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| That annoys me quite a bit. I regularly watch Dota series and
| they can run for 10-14h regularly. It sucks to see it cut off
| after 12h.
| akimbostrawman wrote:
| twitch is nowhere near the size of youtube even if streams are
| usually longer than videos. they also have probably not even 1%
| of the channel amount and at this point there are more streamer
| on youtube than twitch. if youtube (google) can, then twitch
| (amazon) should too.
| mjrpes wrote:
| It's interesting what this situation would be like if HDD
| capacity hadn't stopped its exponential growth in 2010:
| https://imgur.com/a/lWdcjX7
|
| We would be at a penny per terabyte of space. If AV1 in HD can
| store 400 hours of video per TB, the roughly 24TB to store a
| 24/7 stream over the course of a year would cost only 25 cents.
| Providers could keep all video content indefinitely.
|
| Perhaps there's some benefit to this exponential growth coming
| to an end. Imagine a surveillance state that had near limitless
| storage and could keep 24/7 recordings indefinitely of cameras
| on every street, house, vehicle, etc.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Unfortunately that remains a concern. The current research on
| ML based video codecs is yielding almost unbelievable size
| results.
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| Isn't it mostly Twitch Partners who save a lot of videos?
| jjice wrote:
| I have no idea, but I'd assume the opposite. Twitch partners
| seem to make up the vast majority of streams from what I've
| seen. I you take any game and scroll down, there are so many
| people with 0 to 2 viewers (probably another open tab or a
| friend) that are generating video that would be stored, but not
| generating revenue unlike something like a large video game
| tournament.
|
| I'd guess it's something like 99% of content is seldom, if ever
| viewed, but I have no clue.
|
| As for videos over 100 hours, it may be mostly top streamers.
| renewiltord wrote:
| What I don't get is how YouTube does this. I have all sorts of
| videos there for archival with very few views and they just keep
| them? I couldn't blame them if they deleted the videos though I'd
| prefer to have some warning. This is a large amount of space for
| essentially socially useless junk.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| The thing I don't understand about this, why not simply charge
| the creator for it? I know we live in the age of rent extracting
| (as per Varoufakis: feudal) internet platforms but markets do
| actually work. Creators should be customers of a platform like
| Twitch and pay for services provided and this ceases to be a
| problem.
|
| If there's value in the VODs for content creators charge them for
| storage to at least break even, for VODs that don't get any views
| creators will have an incentive to delete them if they have to
| pay, problem solved. There's no need for arbitrary 100 hour
| limits or only targeting x% of creators, just use good old price
| signals.
| rlpb wrote:
| Perhaps they predict that not enough people would pay for it
| such that it's not worth developing such a product in the first
| place.
| cwmoore wrote:
| 100 hours of video games sounds like a lot, but I'm not familiar
| with the use case.
|
| Is this content searchable in any meaningful way for the client?
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